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After the recently announced findings of international group of scientists on archaeological evidence discovered near Tbilisi, Georgian wine was included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest wine.
“Chemical evidence of wine, dating back to 6000 BC, was obtained from residues of ancient pottery excavated in the archeological sites in Georgia”, – the Guinness World Records webpage reads, – “Prior to this discovery, the oldest chemically identified wine from Hajji Firuz Tepe (Iran) dated back to about 5400–5000 BC. These new findings are from about 600–1,000 years earlier, and indicate that wine-making and possibly viticulture were already in place about 8,000 years ago”.
As a reminder, researchers have recently found wine residue on pottery shards at two Georgian sites dating back to 6,000 BC. The pottery jars were discovered in two Neolithic villages, called Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 50km south of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi. The residues were identified as wine since they contained tartaric acid, which only occurs in large amounts in the Eurasian grape in the Middle East and the wine made from it. The detection of other organic acids (malic, citric and succinic), also found in the Eurasian grape, provided confirmatory evidence.
Leading international publications such as BBC, Time, The Guardian and New York Times have reported about this historic discovery which once again proves that Georgia is a real cradle of wine.
Read original page at Guinness Book here.
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